For all the talk of how “psychedelic” Black Moth Super Rainbow
are, the most surreal moment in Thursday’s show might have
been on the drive to Northampton, when a clip of the band’s
song “Born on a Day the Sun Didn’t Rise” served as a segue
for the National Public Radio show Marketplace. The
band received a big bump this year when they enlisted Flaming
Lips producer Dave Fridmann to work on their album Eating
Us, but this hasn’t much changed the way the band carries
themselves. Indeed, success, vintage synthesizers, and oddball
stage names aside, the other continually surreal thing to
observe about this band is that, ostensibly, they’re a bunch
of totally normal kids.

In a venue packed to the gills with the arch-hip (one guy
even came dressed as Doug from the Nickelodeon cartoon), Tobacco,
Father Hummingbird, and the rest of the band came off, shall
we say, a little square. But, in performing a set of music
that featured no between-song banter and continual video projections,
which effectively kept audience attention off of the band,
they framed an audio-visual spectacle that didn’t require
Wayne Coyne-style theatrics.

One sphere removed from their concise songcraft and propulsive
rhythm section (another Lips comparison is due here, I’m afraid),
it’s the band’s command of this contextual frame that makes
their music (and their show) so compelling. It becomes hard
(and irrelevant) to separate out the impact of the audio and
the visuals, and this acute synesthesia generally makes up
for the fact that the band rarely break the rigidity of their
song structures. The whole thing runs a terrible risk of feeling
wooden and postured, but the only truly self-conscious moment
came during the video introduction, when a disgruntled kid
on a Web cam wrote the band off as playing “music for printers.”
The rest of the show was a non-stop kitsch parade of refracted
’80s camp, re-mythologized cultural minutia, and transcendent
tack.

Oscillating synthesizers swelled and peaked as clips from
a public-access yoga show illustrated kundalini rising in
neon beams through a Tom Selleck-looking model. Tobacco’s
trademark vocoder barked robotic lyrics about dissolution
as paranoiac eyes flickered open again and again. And drummer
d.kyler absolutely dominated her drum kit during a tune that
sounded like a reworking of the Sesame Street bit about
the number 12.

This might be splitting semantic hairs, but a better way to
describe the band (and, more particularly, their auteur Tobacco)
than “psychedelic” is “hypnagogic.” Writer David Keenan started
a big to-do last month when he coined the term “hypnagogic
pop” to describe bands like the Skaters and Pocahaunted in
The Wire. BMSR weren’t directly included, but their
approach to collagist art deserves the term, in that it moves
beyond the merely ironic appropriation of cultural detritus
(that pervades music these days) and appeals to that liminal,
child-like state of mind between sleep and wakefulness that
synthesizes these fragments into an archetypal amalgamation
that is earnest, and, at its very strongest, even spiritual.
Hence the casual demeanor and omission of any “freaking out.”
Hence, the humble, “now-there’s-this” delivery. Bands like
BMSR have emerged from the dissonance of cultural relativity
and post-punk cynicism to construct something fresh and consonant
from the wreckage. This is why they’re so exciting, relevant,
and, to borrow a term from another era, “trippy.”

Heavy
Metal Breakdown

Photo:
Joe Putrock

What
doesn’t kill them seems to only make them stronger. The hard-rock
juggernaut known as Crüe Fest 2 hit Saratoga Performing Arts
Center on Tuesday to once again prove to the world that metal
never dies—and neither does Mötley Crüe. The Los Angeles band
are nearing an improbable 30 years on the road, and their
self-named tour has been a major success in an otherwise grim
concert market. The band’s legend is only growing—a film version
of their hit 2001 autobiography The Dirt will hit theaters
next year. Viva Motley!